Freak Show
by Sekah
Summary: In Victorian England, a young crow is on the prowl. Karasu's boyhood curiosity leads him to a freak show on London's fairgrounds. When the ringmaster and apprentice turn out to be exorcists, however, this baby bird is in for far more than he bargained for. Toguro/Karasu. Victorian AU, main character male OC.


Author's Note: Mikhail and Damien are the OCs of a talented friend of mine, used with permission. Enjoy!

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Karasu came to see the beasts that moved with mechanical wheels, but was disappointed to find they were loud and dirty things, as much as the humans who rode them. They belched overpowering black smoke that got in your eyes and mouth when you rode them. Opening a window ensured a lungful of ash. On top of that, every square inch of the iron-bellied monster was stuffed with humans, whose customs were bewildering and who seemed to view Karasu as a tatty low-class adolescent.

Karasu had climbed all over the trains when they lay fallow in the yards, but having experienced a moving one, he began to think these humans were dull as cattle. Didn't it choke them too?

Disillusioned and disappointed, he considered crawling back to the nearby portal in an abandoned field behind a cracked stone manger, but he didn't want to return empty handed.

The smog banks rolled in off the harbor, mixing with the dirty breath of the coal factories. Karasu meandered over the streets in the limpid morning, but people stopped, turned, and stared, wondering loudly in his presence what a Chinaman was doing here, and why his eyes were strange colors. He'd climbed to the building tops above an alley then, annoyed by the scrutiny, and from there, heard the talk of a nearby sideshow, which seemed better sport than this. Karasu skipped over the rooftops, avoiding the gangs of boys who roamed up here, kicking pigeon's nests into alleyways on the heads of old beggars.

Finally he'd chased the show to London's fairgrounds, his sharp vision picking up a circle of bedraggled, colorful tents.

It was a freak show, with big signs Karasu couldn't read. A man in a tatty top hat stood out front. He opened his mouth and began to bellow, "Come one, come all, to see a demon from hell itself exorcised from a hapless citizen, and swallowed by the amazing Mikhail! No tricks, here, no illusions, a demon in the flesh!"

Karasu stirred from his lean against the shadow of a chimney, narrowing his eyes. A demon? Humans had caught a real demon while possessing them? Who would be foolish enough to become prey to a human?

He crouched there, hard for most eyes to see, and began to cackle.

I must have a look at this demon, he thought.

But in his eagerness, he had leaned too far forward and exposed his silhouette. He felt someone's eyes on him, and turned immediately to the fairgrounds' entrance to find who had been watching.

Karasu was tall for his age and lean, raw-boned, but he was still shedding the awkward wings of childhood for the guise of a duplicitous adult. The boy he saw looking up at him with pinched disapproval was at his own state of maturity, perhaps fourteen or fifteen. His hair, despite his tender age, was feathered white around his head. Well-dressed, the boy's suit was tailored to fit him; it seemed better than a circus freak should be able to afford.

There was a magnetism about him, though. Something in Karasu, something demonic and raw, wanted to sip that boy's blood and tears. The man in his ratty tophat led the boy away by a possessive hand on his elbow before Karasu could adequately consider these surprising urges.

His curiosity piqued, Karasu threaded his way around to the back of the tents, stepping atop the spires of a fence that by all rights shouldn't have given him such easy access.

He leapt down to the hard packed earth of the fairgrounds, landing in a crouch. Ahead of him, the big top rose up, a massive apparatus of red and white-striped cloth and rope. Smaller tents and an unhitched cart hemmed him in on every side. Karasu flitted to one of the thick pegs of the main attraction's tent, examining how deeply it'd been dug into the earth.

The gun shot's thunderclap echoed. Karasu was thrown forward over the peg by the bullet, rolling over and clutching the red welling from the wound. His hand clawed, he tried to summon his bombs, but the ring of hot metal pressed to his thigh seconds later smelled like smoke. Karasu looked up into the face of the white-haired boy from earlier. His eyes flicked over, breath wheezing, to see the man in the top hat—handsome in a peaked way, up close, with a shock of black hair under the violet hat—walking over. "Do you have the devil?" he asked the boy, and Karasu was surprised they were talking about him.

"One moment," the boy said, voice cold.

"You're exorcists," Karasu breathed, but a second later he shrieked. The gun had gone off again, point-blank into the muscles of his thigh. There was a small click and a disorienting ache at his neck. It took him a moment to place where he'd felt that before: silver. It was silver. The silver burned his flesh, stripping off the outer layer of skin. That shriek turned into a scream, though, an actual scream that sounded like a human boy's. The veins stood against his neck, lines of red burning crawling up and down his flesh.

He tried to tumble away, his leg raw, gory carnage, as if one of his own bombs had hit it, blood spurting from the charred veins. The silver that was mangling the flesh of his throat kept him upright when someone tugged on it, his screams now so high pitched they seemed soundless to a human, barred by his asphyxiation when all his weight was held up by the collar around his throat.

Words sunk into his blood—a spell of suppression—and he fell into a fetal coil, released, finally, weeping like the boy he was. His iridescent crow's wings burst from out his back, and curled around him, cocooning him as he keened over the pain. He sobbed out, "J–Just kill me hu–human." Karasu moaned, the loss of his power dizzying. He tried to lash out, but prayer strings were looped around his wrists, his thumbs, and his ankles. They bit into his demonic flesh and cut him something awful, turning his writhes into pitiful flops, his pushes against the boy feeling weak as a newborn kitten.

"Are we killing him, Damien?" the boy asked, smooth and cold still, not the least bit affected by the scene before him.

"I think not, I think not," the man, now revealed to be named Damien, said briskly. "A flying boy will make a good act."

"Kill me!" Karasu hissed, his violet eyes bled scarlet from the desperation and pain.

"Take the devil inside, Mikhail," the man said. "Put him in one of the animal cages, for now."

For the first time, Mikhail stopped. "A cage, Damien?" he asked.

The man Damien nodded absentmindedly. "A cage."

_A cage._


End file.
